Stuart Duncan, a web developer in Timmins, Canada, a founder of Autcraft, the first and world biggest server for neurodiverse children. Stuart founded Autcraft in 2013 after his son was diagnosed with autism. The server was created so such children could play their favourite game with others without facing the threat of bullying and discrimination. Autcraft is administered by adults with and without neurodivergencies as well as their friends or family. As of December 2023, the server has over 17 thousand whitelisted players. Autcraft has repeatedly been the subject of research by scholars, and Stuart has been a speaker at conferences such as TED. Stuart is known in-game as AutismFather. [1]
We reward players for being a friend
Due to the Russian war, Ukrainian children are more vulnerable, and lonely, and traumatized and we have millions of refugee children in different countries. And video games are important. Вecause one of the results of all this is that children spend more time online and gaming too.
I am looking for examples of how we can use video games for good.
And I think Autcraft is a brightest example, is Supernova.
I don’t work with autistic people, and I can’t imagine of course how autistic kids and adults may suffer in wartime. But I would really like Ukrainian professionals working with children with autism and parents to learn more about your experience.
First, I have to briefly explain (for readers who don’t know) what a Minecraft server is. It is a game space where many children can get together to build something (like with Lego, but online) and play together. A server also has administrators who make sure everything is in the right way. And I was impressed with how this happens in Autcraft. “You only get noticed when you do something wrong.” you said in your post on Linkedin. Let me quote: “A new member of my community, filled with anxiety, very afraid of getting into trouble, saw an admin (a person of authority) appear, and immediately felt a sense of panic, proclaiming “You only get noticed when you do something wrong.”
But then you said: “I’m happy to report that this person is learning that this is not always true. This is what we do differently in my community”. Сould you tell me about how it works on Autcraft?
A lot of servers when somebody rages or they do something wrong, or they’re causing a problem, or they’re doing things that are against the rules or things like that they get noticed. And they know they get noticed because they get punished they’ll usually just be banned. Staff don’t want to deal with the problem, they’ll just ban them.
On our server, we talk to them and help them to figure out what they did wrong and what they can do better. And we do that because we’re monitoring the server all the time. I watch some of the hours, I have admins in the United States that watch some of the hours, I have admins in the UK, in England and Wales, both watch some. So we have people in different time zones watching the server at different times. We’re not always in the game to play with people, but we try to be, but if we’re not, we’re still watching.
We’re monitoring and we see everything that happens. And that means the bad and the good. So we watch for people who are doing good things like offering tour to new player or digging with somebody if they’re feeling lonely, if they feeling they want somebody to help build them a house, if they want to play a minigame together, if they want to play hide and seek — who’s going to offer to go and play?
But top of that we aren’t just watching ourselves, we encourage the players to report each other. And every game and every website, there’s a report feature, but it’s always to report something bad, to report people, you know, saying racist things or hateful things. We encourage players on the server to report each other for the good things they do. So we might see somebody say: “I’m, I’m lonely, I’m bored, I need somebody to play with, will somebody come and play with me?!” We will watch for the people who will step up and say: “I’ll play with you, what do you want to do”?!
And we make note of that, so they get rewarded. Вut we also encourage those players when somebody says: “I’m going to come and play with you, I’ll keep you company”. We encourage everybody else to report them for the good thing they did, make sure that we didn’t miss anything, make sure that we know and we encourage them to constantly be doing that in life.
These kids, it’s almost like a trauma response, it’s a constant fear that if they do anything, nobody will care until it’s a mistake or they did something wrong or whatever. It might not even be anything major, but they might get reported for it and get in trouble and so they just try to keep a low profile. We’ve found that a lot of players speak up more, they have a lot more self-confidence and they want to offer to help more because they know that the people around them will recognize these good things and report them and they might be rewarded.
On our server, we reward players for good behavior, for being helpful, for being a friend.
We don’t reward people for winning or PvP combat. We don’t reward people for the skills they have, we reward them based on how many reports they get for being such a good player. And we find that it encourages everybody to be an even better person than they already were, because they are number one, they’re not afraid of getting in trouble, they’re not going to be reported because they did something bad, and because they know they might get rewarded if they’re “caught” doing good things enough.
I think that’s a great part and I also want to ask you uh how can you find your admins?
Most Minecraft servers have an application page you can go and you can apply. And then you tell people how many years you’ve been playing Minecraft, what other servers you’ve been an admin on, what tools you know, stuff like that.
On Autcraft, I can’t really do and kind of encourage other servers to follow my lead on this. What I do is I need to see how people will be with the children on the server. And I say “children”, but I mean even with the adults and everybody. I need to see how you will handle arguments, or somebody rage, like having a complete meltdown in rage. I need to see how you handle somebody who’s trapping another player just for fun or if they’re doing something wrong and it might upset the other player, but they didn’t mean any harm. How are you going to handle that?
I need to see you in a lot of different situations over the course of probably months or even years to be sure that you have patience and compassion, you’re respectful, that you’re going to treat these kids right, and do all of this, like being able to diffuse arguments. Do all this without being able to use like admin commands, like you can’t mute them, you can’t put them in a jail, you can’t ban them, you can’t do any of these things, so how are you going to handle it? And if you can handle these things and help these kids, then I will offer for you to be on the team. I will approach you and ask if you would like to do more. And then I will take you on and you can be part of my admin team or even like helpers and stuff like. I have different levels. I ask you to be a part of my team when I know that you will treat the kids right and that takes time. So I don’t just take in applications.
I mean Minecraft is kind of funny because everybody thinks it’s just a video game. So, people treat it like that and they’ll just take in anybody. But like if it was a daycare center or a therapist’s office, psychologist or whatever, you wouldn’t just take anybody off the street who says “hey, let me take care of these kids for you so you can take a break”. You wouldn’t do that. You want to be sure that they’re going to do a good job. The only way to really do that, particularly in a Minecraft server when you’re meeting strangers, you can’t look at their qualifications or their past education, so you have to watch them for a while, see how they are, and if they do a good job then you offer them the role.
Am I right that Autcraft has been around for 13 years? I think that many of your young players have already become adults. Do you hear from these adults about how Autcraft has influenced their lives?
Yeah, I’ve heard from quite a few, and it’s strange because I feel really old every time a kid comes back as an adult. We had one recently, he used to play, guess he was 14 when he started playing, he was so smart, and he used to tell me how to run the server. But he was a good kid. And he played for a few years and then he was gone, and he didn’t migrate his account from Java to Microsoft, so had to get a new account.
He came back this year though with a new account. He said “I want to be back on the server, I miss being on the server, and so we got all this stuff transferred over, we got him on the server. I asked how he’s doing, he said “I’m married now. So I’m 21, it’s been seven years and I’m married now, and I’ve done all the schooling and everything, have a good job and am really happy”. And he has time again and he just wanted to come back home, he wanted to come back to you know the place where he felt safe as a child and he learned so much. He was so happy to be back and see all this old stuff and see everything that reminded him of his youth from seven years ago.
I had another player who joined in 2013 for at the very beginning, and he was, of course, young, and then he came back again in 2021, so it was seven years later, same thing. He started on the server just before high school, like grade 8 or 9, so he was very nervous and scared of high school as you’d expect. He was on the server through that, and we helped him through that and he would talk to us when he was really stressed, and then same he got busy right because after high school was college and university. And he disappeared. And he came back in 2021 at Christmas. He came back to celebrate Christmas but he also messaged me. He says “listen, you helped get me through really really tough times and taught me how to be a friend and how to work with other people and wanted to let you know that I’m done college now”. He got his dream job at Lego at headquarters, the great thing he’s always wanted to do.
And he said if it wasn’t for Autcraft, he doesn’t think he ever would have because. It gave him teamwork skills, it taught him how to report other people for doing well, how to encourage other people to do well and be more open and self-confident and speak up and things like that. He said: “You know, I owe Autcraft so much”. He got his dream job and came back to tell me about it, so that’s pretty cool.
So, I hear stories like that quite a bit, which makes me feel really old, but also reminds me that we’re doing a pretty good job.
I think you are much younger than many adults I knew in their 25’s, and you do really great things.
As for me, I turned my attention to Minecraft as an emotional support’s tool when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Minecraft helped my son through a tough time because of the Russian war. And I think that many Ukrainian children find refuge there in these terrible times.
I think you so in my with autistic people they feel like they don’t really belong in the world. And part of what makes Minecraft so special is that you get to build your own world. It becomes like literally your world, it’s how you want it to be. There’s nobody that tells you the right or wrong way to do it. If you want to have a farm you have a farm, if you want to build a castle, you build a castle, if you want to live underground, you want to live in the sky, whatever you want. It’s your world.
I think you are definitely onto something, because people who are still not where they want to be, people who are living with trauma and violence and bad things all around them, Minecraft would be the perfect escape from all that. Even if the issues are in the house, in the room next door, or in the next next door to them or down the street or whatever. The case is, when you sit down at your computer, you immerse yourself in your world. Even if there’s other people in there, they’re building their things, you’re building your things, your world is how you want it to be, you it’s so freeing, it’s so stress release just to be in control of your own little peaceful world that runs the way you want it to. I think that would be a huge benefit to everybody who’s gone through so much already.
My son wanted me to play Minecraft with him when he was 10-11. But I was so busy, I had no time… But now I really like the game. I like to build something, and I realize how healing it may be. I have spoken with Ellie Finch and Rachel Conlisks, who do great things with Minecraft for helping kids, and there are other great professionals. I want to create in the future or, maybe, inspire some people to create a small server for Ukrainian kids who are especially lonely due to the war. What do you think, what would be the main thing for the start?
What’s the main thing like in general, like ever? So, you haven’t started the server yet, you’re still getting information, you’re still trying to figure out what to do, right?
As silly as it seems as it sounds, my biggest piece of advice is to just dive in and do it and figure it out as you go.
When I started in 2013, Minecraft was not even three years old and most of that was in Beta and Alpha, you know, like before. It had most of what it has now like when I started my server.
It was the Redstone update so imagine having to figure out redstone because there were no tutorials or videos on it, it was brand new.
There were no world borders, you can go as far as you wanted to.
I couldn’t lock people in most of the things, most of the plugins and stuff didn’t work very well and I had to figure it all out on my own.
I didn’t know any other server owner, didn’t know people at Mojang who run the game and like I said in six months everything was kind of corrupted and damaged and we couldn’t play it anymore and had to start over.
I was able to choose admins, people who have been there for a while. I had to choose admins on the first day, because it ended up being much bigger than I thought it would be. So I chose some friends of mine and they did an okay job, not the best, but an okay one. They ran things a lot while I was fielding all the emails and questions and everything that was coming in. But I had to figure a lot of it out on my own.
And you don’t have to.
You’re talking to me right now, you’ve talked to some other people.
The game is running a whole lot better than ever. There’s Education Edition out now. There’s two different Wiki’s it’s being moved, I think they have all the data on everything. Plugins work better than ever. You’re in a good place, because you have a lot of resources that you did not have. But Ii would still encourage you not to wait until you feel like you’re ready, because you’ll never feel like you’re ready.
I didn’t know a lot of servers back then. I probably wasn’t the very first one to not just ban people instead talk to people. There’s probably other people, nice people out there who did that but I had to figure these things out on my own and come up with systems on my own. And I had never been a boss before. I’d never had staff before so didn’t know about leadership or running things or organizing people to build big projects together to make the server work, like literally everything about the entire thing had to figure out on my own. And that’s when people come to me and say “well, Autcraft is a big success, so what are you going to do now”? “Are you going to do a server for people with Down syndrome?” Are you gonna do a server for these people or those people, and my answer is always “why don’t you do it?”.
I can teach you how to use the world to protect people’s builds so nobody can break stuff. I can teach you how to use world edit so that you can build things faster and more efficiently. I can teach you how to do a lot of different things on your server, but the biggest thing, especially to make it your own, which you would have to do. Because you’re not building a server for autistic kids, you’re building it for Ukrainian people all around the world, is to figure it out on your own, and you will do that in time just by making mistakes and you’ll do it in time by bringing on good people, you see them on the server working with those kids and keeping them happy they will.
One of the things that I think helps Autcraft work so well is that I’m autistic and autistic parent, but I also have a child who’s not autistic. But i still don’t know everybody’s viewpoint and I can’t consider all of the perspectives of every decision I make so by having people who are responsible, compassionate and patient all these So, my biggest advice to anybody starting a server is start it and then figure it out, don’t wait until you figured it out to start — start it!
What can I say to that? I think you are totally right!
Safe and Happy
I am currently developing a quest for emotional support for Ukrainian refugee children in Germany. I would like to combine the real and the virtual there. I mean a Minecraft that would be combined with a pen and paper quests. I would be interested to hear your opinion on such things.
I think if you can make children feel two things: safe and happy then that’s just going to happen all on its own.
On Autcraft we have players from five years old to in their 60s, we’ve had grandparents join us to play. But some of those younger players, I’ve seen them learn how to read and write on their own. Nobody’s correcting their spelling, nobody’s teaching them, they’re just there with other people around them, and because they’re feel safe enough to make a spelling mistake, nobody’s going to tease them, nobody’s going to make fun of them, nobody’s going to call them a bad speller, they can make spelling mistakes, most of the kids on the server spell things phonetically the way they sound, not the way they’re supposed to be spelled, and nobody corrects them. They just see other people spell it correctly, and when they see it spelled correctly, they go, oh, that’s how it should be. And then they start spelling it the same way.
But it’s not just spelling, it’s everything right, like i said, like speaking up, when somebody asks a question “what music do you like”, or did you see this movie or read these books, or “what do you think about Pluto not being a planet anymore”. Questions about like opinions and things, lot of the kids are afraid to speak up, but because they feel safe, nobody make fun of them, tease them because they’re happy and they get to talk about these things in the safe place, they’re more willing to share, and when they do — they learn.
They learn about space.
They learn about why Pluto is not a planet.
They learn about the books and the movies and all these things.
In my case, because I reward people and encourage people for being helpful and to play with people who are lonely and being a friend and things like that.
I will give you a real world example. We had one player. He used to lie a lot, he used to say that he did great big things, he threw out the first pitch at a baseball game, he did, but he told these tall tales because he wanted people to like him. He wanted to be important, and over time he realized he didn’t have to do that, and that faded. He was just able to be himself and have fun and when he did that, he became more helpful, he became more of a friend and we actually gave him the helper role which gives you a few more permissions like being able to teleport around, a bit things like that. And that went on for years.
And then one day he came on the server, but it seemed like panic. He seemed really emotional, but he was excited, and he came on and he said, “I got to tell you something, I got to tell you something”. What is it? He says: “I went to the grocery store with my mom, we were getting groceries, and I saw an old lady who was leaving the grocery store and she was pushing her cart to her car full of groceries, and she was having a hard time. And he said: “I went over and asked her if I could help, I pushed this cart and I got her to her car and helped put her bags in the trunk, and she said “What a sweet young man””. He said: “As soon as I got home, I had to come and tell you, because if you hadn’t made me a helper, if you hadn’t gotten me to be your helping people on the server, I never would have done that”.
He was thanking me and thanking Autcraft because it made him a helpful person in real life. I never told him to go and do that, but he just felt like he could go and help that person the same way he had been doing that over and over again.
If you can make children feel safe and happy, and encourage the best behavior out of them, you are going to hear a lot about the good things that they do in the world.
I think you could encourage these types of things, you could get kids to be doing these sorts of things in their communities, even if they’re a refugee in some country that is not great, then maybe they can help out that community that they’re part of to say thanks, things like that. So yeah, you can certainly encourage those sorts of things and come back and report to you and stuff, and that will help their development, it will help them integrate where they are, I think that would be awesome.
Anyway if you can make them feel safe and happy, and encourage the best behavior out of them, you are going to hear a lot about the good things that they do in the world.
Thank you, it was very important for me to hear that.
There’s a lot of wonderful things happening in Minecraft
What would you say to parents who are worried about addiction or other threats from video games?
Gaming has been around for 50 years now. We’ve all played some games at some point, and it’s not the mindless activity that people used to think it was. You can learn even in single player all by yourself, you can learn problem solving skills, you have to figure out how to solve the games.
You can learn patience because you’re not going to do well at first, but you’ll get better.
You can learn so many things: hand to eye coordination, being able to press the buttons in the right combinations at the right time, and pattern recognition.
You can learn all these things but when you start to add in so much more like an online community, particularly one that is encouraging friendship and cooperation rather than competing. There’s a reason that Minecraft now has an Education edition. It is taught in schools, the world’s biggest library now is in Minecraft. They have every book from everywhere, any band books, anything, there’s a library for it in Minecraft. People are recreating their countries in Minecraft. There’s a lot of wonderful things happening in Minecraft.
We have a white list so we ask people where they heard Autcraft from. One of the top answers is therapist, or child doctor, or teacher. People are being recommended by professionals to come to Autcraft because it’s a safe and fun and good environment for them to be in where they won’t be bullied or teams or things like that.
Long gone are the days of the stuffy suit wearing old people who hate rock and roll and television and video games. One of the things I love most about Autcraft is that it’s being researched so much. There’s so many research papers and I love that because it means that those professionals, those people who have these opinions, like not real scientific data, but opinions and fears, valid fears, are now being shown that maybe they were wrong. Maybe video games can be useful, it can be used as a tool. It can be used in the right way to help children not only escape, but be happy and learn and become a better person than they were before.
And I can’t reach those professors and PHd’s, and all those people who obviously truly do know better than me. But if enough people come to my server who can write about it, analyze the data, put it into medical terms, and make it sound professional and stuff, then those people who have had all those opinions all the time will change, they will change their mind. They will have their eyes opened and they will see that video games when used right.
You don’t want a child to only be in video games all the time, but you also don’t only want a child to be playing baseball or hockey or football, you don’t only want a child to be painting all the time.
They could become great at those things, but it’s healthy to do those things with other things. So I would encourage parents to see video games as they do anything else, it’s good, it’s healthy, it can be a good tool, painting, playing music, doing science, playing sports, all these things are good things and you should not take it away. But still you know make sure that that’s not all they do.
I want to thank you for the conversation. I need to add that awareness of autism and autistic people is very important for Ukraine. For 70 years, Ukraine was occupied by the USSR. Or rather, Russia, which was behind the USSR. After World War II, the USSR kicked people and former soldiers with disabilities off the streets. They were even exiled from large cities. Why? Because these people didn’t look beautiful enough for the communist paradise. You can read about it. People with mental problems. Autistic people. LGBT people…. Any people who are different in some way. They were either hidden or destroyed. There were just two options.
Yeah it’s terrible.
And when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it took us a time for change. So this is another reason why I am talking to you: to accelerate this change. I’m sure that your experience would be important for Ukrainian mental health professionals, for our teachers, social workers, and parents of course. Thank you, Stuart!
